It Doesn't Matter What People Think

                                                               by Viola Weinberg

                                      
                                                                                             Years after they beat you with that airless book
                                               of essential etiquette, chapter by weary chapter
                                               Decades past party gloves and patent leather shoes
                                               and the dicta of the succession of forks and 
                                               how to dislodge a small sea urchin from its spiny well
                                               There you were in Provence sucking down mountains 
                                               of mussels, throttling escargot with a butter knife
                                               using a jam spoon to sup cold quince soup

                                               Just down the road from St. Remy, where Van Gogh's
                                               soul is forever trapped in a patch of Iris and a wheel of hay
                                               nothing matters to you, buttered and breaded with 
                                               the crumbs of one plump oyster after another
                                               chin dripping, the white cloth changed twice, Champagne bottles
                                               rolling on the table, one dead soldier after another
                                               There are times when it doesn't matter what people think of you
                                               when your true love sloppy kisses you and wipes his hands

                                              On your soiled sweater, straining through the yarns of happiness
                                              when you are a little too loud in your revels as if sprung
                                              that very morning from the Bastille of your conformatory
                                              Each of you with your legs wrapped like peppermint sticks
                                              at a feast of the will, in the end, when you are dead and gone
                                              it hardly matters that for one evening, you tasted the starry night
                                              under the plane trees with the racquet of cigale, buried deep
                                              in Cezanne territory, drunken libido and messy accordion song